All interest necessarily links the person with the external environment: the object/s of interest. Research into children's interests is examined in the context of a rapidly-expanding literature which has generated several powerful concepts in recent decades, notably "individual interest", "situational interest" and "topic interest". The first is…

Many children do not enjoy social studies because they see it as having little, if any, relevance to their lives. That response is attributable primarily to two factors: Dry content and even drier instructional strategies. Teachers know that if material presented to children is not meaningful and relevant to their lives, real learning does not…